


dissidant

by hellbeast



Series: broken string [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Barely Canon Compliant, Gen, Lore - Freeform, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-19
Updated: 2014-02-19
Packaged: 2018-01-13 02:44:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1209793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellbeast/pseuds/hellbeast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His name is Nick. That is all he remembers.</p><p>His name is Lucifer. He knows much, but wishes to recall none of it.</p><p>They are the Morningstar. And they know all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dissidant

**Author's Note:**

> this is the result of me wanting to incorporate Morningstar into canonical lore and also refusing to write Lucifer!Sam

_The squeak-groan-shatter of breaking glass, and an explosion of light – too bright, too too bright, burning and flaring like a star about to go supernova. Everything is a jumble of colors and sounds; he has been so long without eyes, without senses, and now they all come rushing back before he can comprehend. For a blessed few milliseconds, he doesn’t feel._

_And then, agony._

_All of his nerves come alight at once; every individual ending screaming as an anguish unlike any he’s ever felt consumes him. The world feels pressurized, and it’s dragging him down down down into darkness._

_He is dying._

_He can feel himself falling, legs trembling, and blood bubbling up his throat, and skin a bloody ragged mess. Pain and agony and an underlying sense of bitter relief. There is a gaping hole inside him, where a power too great to be contained used to rest. It aches, now that it’s gone. For the longest, he hadn’t thought that it would ever go; he thought that it would be part of him for as long as he lasted. He nearly wants it back, wants to be whole. But then he remembers that it was never his in the first place; it was only temporary. The realization startles and saddens him. Yes, that’s what it is; agony and disbelief and sadness._

_And then, nothing._

* * *

(“Yes, okay?” a deep inhale, “ _Yes_.”)

* * *

_He can’t be sure of when, but suddenly, he is aware. Immediately, he knows this is not his body; it’s too tall, too muscled. He is not in control, not even near it. He’s an interloper, a squatter at best; orbiting the other inhabitants of the body. Even so, he can **feel** without screaming in pain for the first time in a long time._

_There are two other presences, and he can feel one far more clearly than the other. Both are bright, and though he can’t quite explain how he knows, they each have different types of brightness. One is foreign and all-consuming and beautiful and the other is beautiful and far-reaching and fluid._

_All around, there is light. It’s bright and warm, halogen bright and as painful to look at directly._

_The other two are quiet in their wonder and exploration of the light. One of them – the one he’s tethered to – writhes and amasses until it has both him and the other soul wrapped in its essence._

_**We are not dying here,** it says._

_The light around them flickers, like a light bulb going out, and then explodes. Supernova meltdown._

_The last thing he knows is the feeling – the feeling, how long has it been since he’s felt? – of being covered, smothered._

_Saved._

* * *

(“And you think to defeat me, where my esteemed older brother could not?”

A whine in the air, the sound of so much power – too much, so insurmountable – gathering, swirling.

“Allow me to show you the error of your ways.”)

* * *

His name is Nick.

That is all he remembers.

* * *

He wakes up with a shock, a sudden force of consciousness, and before his muscles can relax, he knows that he’s not alone.

He is lying back to back against someone, and he can feel hair tickling the back of his neck. His or theirs, he doesn’t know, can’t tell. From the way his limbs are splayed, and the fact that he can feel the pressure of legs entangled with his own tells him that the two of them probably fell together, and stayed that way.

He doesn’t know where he is.

The floor is concrete and cold, so possibly a warehouse, but it doesn’t occur to him to look. There is blood; on the floors, on him, in his mouth, in the air. He can taste it, feel it, smell it, see it. He can also see bodies, strewn about as far as his gaze will allow. Some are blackened, as though charred, and others are mere bloody giblets of flesh and puddles of blood. Brushing against every surface, staining and clinging, is black ash. All together it paints a grisly picture. He isn’t disgusted or nauseated, though. Rather, he is tired. Empty. The heavy weight of being awake when all his body wants is rest bears down on him – he feels nothing but lethargy and aches. He wants to stop this, stop living.

Nick is so very tired.

The body behind him moves.

He lies limp and holds his breath, not daring to move, and waits. He hears the shifting of cloth and can feel the movement of a warm body. A sharp intake of breath and a sudden tension alert him to the fact that he has been noticed, and worse yet, _remembered_.

He is sticky with blood, and he knows without having to check that very little of it is his.

Nick doesn’t remember much of what’s happened, after, but he knows that above all other things, he is not a good man.

A large hand grabs hold of his shoulder, and he has to force himself not to react. His heart is pumping furiously, but he knows – somehow, he knows – that it would do him well to play opossum. He lets his eyes slip closed as he is rolled over onto his back. Deft hands check his pulse, which calms considerably at a touch that falls somewhere between cautious and non-hostile.

 _Breathe_ , he thinks, _be calmed_.

He never means to pass out.

* * *

_“… telling you…. cifer! It's... vessel.”_

He awakens to an argument.

_“Yeah? Well… fuckin’ _looks_ like him to me…. ot dead?”_

_“… might be…. Could have hidden….ow his name?”_

He’s on the floor again – that’s what it feels like anyway. For all he knows, it could be a bed. Nick’s senses are a little… off. Everything feels both too large and far too small. He feels everything all at once and nothing at all. He keeps wavering between being hyper-aware of everything – the breathing of the other people in the room, the way the elements have raged against the building they’re in, the blood pumping through four bodies on this floor and the three thousand, four hundred and seventeen bodies over twenty three miles away, and the light pouring in through a window across the room that he can’t even _see_ – and just as suddenly only being aware of his own bodily aches and throbbing head. His neck hurts and he thinks that he might be thirsty.

He gathers all the saliva in his mouth (not much) and swallows. Yes, he decides, that is definitely thirst. The voices – arguing passionately – are nearby. He will ask them. He swallows again, but his voice still comes out a thick and dusty whisper.

“I would like water.”

All noise grinds to a complete halt.

He hasn’t bothered to open his eyes yet – the skin of his eyelids feels swollen and sore and his left temple is _throbbing_ – but he knows that there are three people in the room with him. He can feel the weight of their stares. Everything still feels heavy; burdened. The stares only add to the feeling. He wishes he could make them stop, but he is too tired to put forth the effort.

After a few minutes, when there has been no answer, not even a whisper of movement, he cracks his right eye open. Barely, for even that sends aches rocketing through his body. Everything is blurry, and he can at first only make out basic clumps of colour and shape. When things slide into focus, the first person he sees has bright blue eyes, dark hair and a sense of great fatigue about him. The man seems familiar, if in a vague way. The man feels larger, and so much more than he looks. Nick clears his throat and speaks again, with the same rust in his voice.

“Water, please?”

The air shifts from his left – his self-inflicted blind spot – and then comes the angry crack of something against his temple, and then nothing.

* * *

His name is Lucifer.

He knows much, but wishes to recall none of it.

* * *

He’s not dead, nor is he in Heaven. Or Hell.

However, he is not in the realm of the living at the moment.

He is stuck in a flesh body with the soul of a man who hates himself and who is the second most likely to understand the way that Lucifer thinks. The first most likely is currently back in his own body, and staring at him.

“Why aren’t you dead,” his true vessel says flatly.

(they are both nowhere and everywhere, awake and unconscious, alive and dead, all at once. the universe is at odds, uncertain of what fate they are to suffer)

Lucifer wants to answer – because he and Death aren’t on the best of terms since that whole binding ordeal, and because someone saved him – but he also knows that his true vessel doesn’t really want to hear him. He never has.

And that was probably the biggest kick in the ass – to have found his true vessel, so beautiful and made for him, only to have his vessel deny him at every turn and plot against him and hate him with an intensity that Lucifer couldn’t even begin to understand.

If there were to be anyone who would understand Lucifer’s choices, his reasons, it would be his true vessel, because they’d had the same experiences, been forced into the same situations, when it came down to it. And yet.

“Leave,” his true vessel commands him, dismissively.

And for all that his vessel refuses him, he could never do the same in turn. He could never deny his vessel, especially the one who’d freed him from the Hell of his Father’s making. His true vessel tells him to go, and so-

He does.

* * *

They are the Morningstar.

And they know all.

* * *

When they awaken again, they are tied to a chair with thick and coarse rope. They can feel the oppressive power of numerous binding and constraining sigils all around them. Their eyes open slowly, a flutter of lashes that do nothing to stop the flow of blood from the cut on their forehead.

“You have gotten smarter,” They murmur, and they can taste in the air how the power has returned to their voice. “To bind us in this manner.”

A shame, though, that the bindings could not even hope to hold a being such as themselves. Though, that need not be known to their captors.

Their captors; standing before them are three men – No. Two men and an angel. Names come to them through a hazy trickle of memory, the brothers Winchester and the Angel of Thursday. Sam, Dean, Castiel.

They crane their neck back to let blood congeal, and then raise their eyes to meet the hard, if frantic, gaze of Sam Winchester.

“Hello, Sam,” They say. Sam shudders, a movement that runs the length of his entire frame. Their eyes slide left, and then further right. “Hello, Dean. Hello, Lord Brother Castiel.”

The formal title catches Castiel’s attention, as they knew it would. The angel tilts his head to the side a few scant degrees, and frowns.

“… The Morningstar?”

They smile, and close their eyes.

Noise explodes around them.

* * *

“The Morningstar cannot be killed!” Castiel’s voice is loud, despite the fact that he is not yelling. Instead, it is commanding and pure gravel, and all the more attention-grabbing because of it.

“Please tell me you’re joking, Cas. It’s fucking _Lucifer_! He should be dead to begin with!” That voice he assumes is Dean’s. Nick’s only heard Sam’s voice from his and Lucifer’s… meetings, and no one but an angel would protest their deaths.

 _Their_ deaths.

Fuck, his head is a mess. Everything is all jumbled up, and all of his memories flare like a dying angel, too bright to gaze into (which is exactly his point, because now he _knows_ what an angel looks like in death). All he knows is that he isn’t dead, and Lucifer isn’t dead, and somehow they’re now one person. And that’s the most confusing part – one second he’s Nick, in full control of all his facilities, if a little confused. He is a man who’s made some terrible choices, who’s tired and just wants to die because he was the fucking harbinger by _choice_. And then everything slides sideways into batshit, and he and Lucifer – Lucifer who isn’t dead, who’s the most powerful seraph in existence, who can wax sweet poetic poison and tempt with barely a look – are the Morningstar. They aren’t two, but one, a regal and ineffable they.

It doesn’t make sense, because he’s not an angel – he’s not anybody. It doesn’t make sense, because Lucifer won’t say anything, won’t come to the forefront despite the fact that Nick is his vessel again. Lucifer is doing his best to just not be. And yet, without Nick, Lucifer is just Lucifer; cruel and saccharine, with a measured voice and an intense stare, pretending to still be holy. But with him, with Nick, Lucifer is once again the Morningstar; restored to his former glory and strength and grace and wonder. As the Morningstar, they are serene. As the Morningstar, they are fractured no more. Lucifer is humbled, and Nick is cherished; they balance out. They depend on each other. They need each other. It’s supposed to be as much a punishment as it is a reward, he figures.

Someone, Nick decides, has a really fucked up sense of humor.

* * *

This is what Lucifer knows:

The entire situation is the meddling work of some higher power. Many would say God, but Lucifer knows his Father, and this is not He. It has the irony and cruelty of one of Gabriel’s jokes, but Lucifer had ended Gabriel with his brother’s own blade ( _brother, don’t make me **do** this_ ).

There are few gods left with the power to challenge him, and he does not think any of them are so spiteful or foolish as to needlessly antagonize him after what happened at Elysian Fields. To do such a thing as this, they would have to be either in spite or simply ignorant, of that Lucifer is sure. But only that.

And so what Lucifer knows is that he does _not_ know.

It is this, more than the reality of being tethered to a useless sack of flesh and poison, that causes him distress.

* * *

The Winchesters and Castiel do not trust them, as they should. Dean regards them with open disgust and hostility, which they find amusing; such posturing for one so insignificant and weak. Sam considers them with something that might be curiousity and intrigue, hidden beneath many layers of caution and distrust.

Castiel, however, is another matter entirely.

They had not been acquainted before the Fall, but they know that Castiel can sense them for what they are, what they have become; a fully restored seraph of the highest caliber, and not the sham of an archangel they had been so long trapped as. There is no blade that can kill a seraph, and the Morningstar is far more than that.

And so to the Winchesters Castiel says, “The Morningstar cannot be killed.”

* * *

“Please, Lord Brother Morningstar,” Castiel begins formally, not continuing until the seraph encased within the body of the human known as Nick looks up and holds his gaze, “Will you tell us what happened?”

The seraph smiles serenely – which Sam decides is a default expression, one of hazed pleasure – and then nods.

“We were separate, and then we became whole.”

If Sam’s honest, he was sort of expecting this cryptic bullshit. Every ‘higher being’ seems to have a penchant for it, and if Morningstar is as powerful as Cas says it is, Sam guesses they’re lucky to be even getting English.

“You wanna be a little more specific there?” Dean says, in a tone of voice that practically begs for smiting, but Morningstar just smiles.

“It began when Sam said yes, and ended when Michael chose cowardice. Before, we had been separated, and weaker. But something intervened on all of our behalves and remade us into something better. Now, we are together and whole and _divine_.”

It’s not much clearer, but it will have to do for now.

Morningstar stares straight at him, and says, “We _saved_ each other.”

Sam shudders, and looks away.

* * *

Sam comes back, as they knew he would. He waits until his brother and the angel leave for a nearby bar before he comes slinking back, regarding the seraph with an open curiousity now that no one is there to catch it.

“Before,” Sam says, just shy of demanding, “did you know this would happen? That Lucifer and Nick were the two halves of you?”

“No,” Morningstar replies, as tranquil as before, “It was decided by something far more powerful, after all of our deaths.”

“So whatever brought us back made the two of them inseparable?” To be honest, it sounds like a shit deal for Nick, Sam thinks.

But then again, if Lucifer was to be believed, the man’s life had become a hell of its own making before he said yes, so being a vital component of an omniscient being might’ve been the break he needed.

Morningstar sighs, and shoots Sam a disappointed look.

“You misunderstand us again, Samuel,” the seraph despairs, “When we say we came together, we do not simply mean man and devil. Lucifer and Nick are crucial, yes, but the two of them together are but one half of something far more grandiose.”

“What did you mean then? What’s the other half?” Sam regrets the words the second he says them, because he realizes that he doesn’t want to hear it. He already knows. And indeed, Morningstar replies, smiling,

“You.”

* * *

“I don’t remember a lot,” Nick admits, when Sam asks. He stays still as Sam cuts the ropes holding him, and then uses a wet cloth to wipe away the sigils painted onto his bared skin, “but I think Lucifer took me with him when he- when you said yes.”

Sam helps him stand, silent, and then leads him into another room, where there is a couch, a table covered in stacks of books and papers, and a TV on a rickety stand.

“Then there was a lot of confusion. And Lucifer was angry and disappointed, and then he… just sort of stopped? Then everything exploded.”

“It was a trap,” Sam supplies, “He was supposed to have his big showdown with Michael, but since Michael didn’t have the right vessel, he sent most of heaven’s forces in his place. They tried to ambush Lucifer—they tried to ambush _us_ in this old warehouse. Lucifer went supernova, wiped them all out.”

“Oh,” Nick says, not sure of what to feel. He’s seen an angel die now, with his own eyes, so the memory of all that ash spread through the warehouse has a grisly new meaning.

“When he did… whatever it is he did,” Sam continues, “it destroyed my body. I don’t know if he knew we were coming back or not, but in any case, he shielded our souls and -”

“No, he didn’t.”

It’s not until Sam startles and stares at him that Nick realizes it was him who spoke.

“At first… I thought it was Lucifer,” Nick whispers, biting his lip despairingly, “He wanted your soul, and I was just along for the ride. But… the more I think about it…”

Sam passes him a beer. Nick takes a long pull and sighs deeply.

“I think it was you. Your soul, shielding both of ours. I think _you_ saved _us_.”

* * *

“I brought you some food,” Sam says to Nick as he enters the room, shrugging out of his jacket, “It’s just the usual greasy shit, but I got three bags worth, just in case Cas stops in. You know how he feels about burgers.”

It’s not until Sam looks up that he realizes Nick hasn’t moved.

_That’s not Nick._

The thought comes quickly, and with it, a burst of adrenaline that has Sam with his back to the door and a gun in his hands.

Lucifer, stock still and wide-eyed, stares at him from the small dining table. He’s perched awkwardly on a chair, in the manner of someone who isn’t quite sure how chairs work. The shadow of thousands of wings stretch on the wall behind him.

“What did you do to Nick,” Sam says, and it’s not a question.

“I-,” Lucifer frowns, at his own hesitance or at Sam’s question, he can’t be sure, “I have as much free reign with this body as he does.”

Sam doesn’t let the gun waver, not that it will actually do anything, “So why’s it taken you seven months to show your face?”

Lucifer averts his eyes just so, training his gaze on Sam’s hands and the gun.

“I was… hiding. It’s… difficult, reconciling my actions with the sheer holiness of Morningstar’s grace,” the words come slowly and weighted, as though Lucifer hadn’t wanted to release them but was helpless to stop them, “And… you told me to leave.”

He still won’t look at Sam. His words are halted, forced through clenched teeth.

 _I will never lie to you_ , Sam recalls. He shakes the memory away.

“I think I would’ve remembered talking to you,” Sam says sharply.

“Before Nick woke up,” Lucifer clarifies, “Before we were Morningstar, but after we should’ve died.”

“And, what,” Sam snaps, “You just decided to actually listen to me?”

Lucifer shrugs, still not looking Sam in the eye.

“You told me to.”

Sam frowns then, because Lucifer is shying away from him as though he’s in the wrong. Sam, in what has to be a temporary lapse of sanity, reaches to lay a comforting arm on Lucifer’s shoulder. If he can forgive the vessel, he figures, why not the inhabitant?

And of course, that’s when Dean and Cas come in.

It doesn’t really go well, after that.


End file.
